Wednesday, April 13, 2016

1. Where is it?

If you have any kind of admin access to a Facebook page you’ll see an extra bar over the cover image on the page. In the middle is a link to “Insights” Facebook’s own analytics which help you gauge how well your page is performing, what kind of people are interested in it and what content is most popular.

There are many different subsections of Insights but the first page gives you the summary and it’s very handy for quick regular checks. By default it’s set to cover the last 7 days and will tell you what your largest single demographic is, how they’re accessing your content (tablet, mobile etc), how many people you’ve reached in the last week and how many likes you’re gathering week on week.

2. Post performance

Below that is a summary of how your last 5 posts have performed. It separates paid-for from organic performance and – most useful – tells you what kind of post each one is (text-only, image, video etc). You can see from this screenshot that images work extremely well – surprise!

3. Checking out the competition

The really cool part is just below this section. You can check out the competition. “Pages to Watch” allows you to specify what other pages you’d like to track and will report on their likes, posts and level of engagement. So if a page suddenly has great levels of engagement, this where you’ll get the tip-off and can go see what they’re up to.

That will get you started and I’ll leave you to explore the other sections and feel free to ask questions below. However there are two more features that aren’t immediately apparent that you might find useful

4. Exporting Data

You can export data on the performance of the page or individual posts over a 60 day period. The level of detail it provides can be quite daunting but if you’ve got very specific questions about posts or post types that might be the best option. The link is on the top right hand side of the main Insights page.

5. Times to Post

If you click on “Posts” you’ll get a graph showing what time of day your followers are online. Obviously this is the most logical place for that information to be displayed [NOT]. However, it is dead handy when it comes to planning what times of day you want to post.

(This page also lets you check out the top posts from the pages you watch, just sayin’....)